Whicker: Lomachenko looks for title in second pro fight

Vasyl Lomachenko walks away after knocking down Jose Ramirez in the first round of his first professional bout in Las Vegas last October. Lomachenko won by TKO in the fourth round. ETHAN MILLER, GETTY IMAGES

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MARINA DEL REY – Some people believe they can fly. They aren’t boxing people.

You might see a pie in the sky. Boxing people see an asteroid.

Boxing people aren’t sure the KGB had nothing to do with the Miracle On Ice, and they wouldn’t be shocked if Bin Laden was alive and well.

Sure, they’re more jaded than a necklace in Shanghai. They’ve been around boxing.

So they are not all sold on the fact that Vasyl Lomachenko, the two-time Olympic gold medalist from the Ukraine, is going for a WBO belt in his second professional fight.

Lomachenko doesn’t understand it either.

“Of course I was surprised,” he said Wednesday before he trained at CMC Boxing. “I was aiming to do that in my first professional fight. Why do I have to wait until the second?”

He was smiling but not joking.

“When we met with him and signed him, that’s what he said,” said Bob Arum, CEO of Top Rank. “We told him how we usually handle fighters, about fighting four-rounders and six-rounders, and he said, no, he wanted to fight for a title right away.

“We said, ‘Well, hold on. How about if you fight a good fighter in your debut and then you’ll fight the winner of a championship fight?’ He said OK.”

Lomachenko then took apart Jose Ramirez last October, on the Tim Bradley-Juan Manuel Marquez undercard.

In the very next fight, Orlando Salido beat up Orlando Cruz for WBO featherweight honors.

Thus, it’s the 1-0 Lomachenko against the 40-12-1 Salido on March 1 in San Antonio, just before Julio Cesar Chavez’s rematch with Bryan Vera.

This is brazen stuff.

“Tell me about it,” Arum said.

Lomachenko was 396-1 in his amateur career and then twice beat the one guy who beat him. But he never has gone past five rounds. He’s scheduled for 12 with Salido, 34, who has fought 10 or more rounds nine times.

Salido is a world-class warrior who beat Juan Manuel Lopez twice and went 12 rounds in losses to Marquez and Yuriorkis Gamboa.

“Every time you go into the ring there is danger,” Lomachenko said, “so Salido is the same as everyone else.”

He is betting on his uniqueness. He is not the only one.

“The things he does in training are extraordinary,” said Arum, in Macau to promote a weekend card that features Chinese Olympic champ Zou Shimming.

“He comes out of the ring and walks around on his hands. He spends an hour with a sports psychologist after that. There are a lot of Russian writers over here and they talk about Lomachenko like he’s God.”

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